Category: Poetry

Anthology / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Non-fiction / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: The First Line – Summer 2023

Deadline: May 1st, 2023
Payment: $25.00 – $50.00 for fiction, $5.00 – $10.00 for poetry
Theme: Story must begin with: “All the lawns on Mentone Avenue are mowed on Wednesdays.”

We love that writers around the world are inspired by our first lines, and we know that not every story will be sent to us. However, we ask that you do not submit stories starting with our first lines to other journals (or post them online on public sites) until we’ve notified you as to our decision (usually four weeks after the deadline). When the entire premise of the publication revolves around one sentence, we don’t want it to look as if we stole that sentence from another writer. If you have questions, feel free to drop us a line.

Also, we understand that writers may add our first line to a story they are currently working on or have already completed, and that’s cool. But please do not add our first line to a previously published story and submit it to us. We do not accept previously published stories, even if they have been repurposed for our first lines. And, just to be clear, we do not accept simultaneous submissions.

One more thing while I’ve got you here: Writers compete against one another for magazine space, so, technically, every literary magazine is running a contest. There are, however, literary magazines that run traditional contests, where they charge entry fees and rank the winners. We do not – nor will we ever – charge a submission fee, nor do we rank our stories in order of importance. Occasionally, we run contests to help come up with new first lines, or we run fun, gimmicky competitions for free stuff, but the actual journal is not a contest in the traditional sense.

Fiction: All stories must be written with the first line provided. The line cannot be altered in any way, unless otherwise noted by the editors. The story should be between 300 and 5,000 words (this is more like a guideline and not a hard-and-fast rule; going over or under the word count won’t get your story tossed from the slush pile). The sentences can be found on the home page of The First Line’s website, as well as in the prior issue. Note: We are open to all genres. We try to make TFL as eclectic as possible.

Poetry: We do accept poetry, though rarely. We have no restrictions on form or line count, but all poems must begin with the first line provided. The line cannot be altered in any way.

Non-Fiction: 500-800 word critical essays about your favorite first line from a literary work.

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Contest / Events / Flat Amount / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls 2023 Contest

Deadline: March 1st, 2023
Prizes: $50 to the and $10 to honorable mentions
Theme: Poetry with a theme of: Seasick

the theme for this year’s contest is seasick. with global greenhouse gas emissions climbing, we want poetry that examines the way human activity is affecting the ocean. we want your drowning islands, your melting glaciers, your bleached coral. we want your hurricanes, your flooding, your erosion. we want your seasick.

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contest submissions will remain open from november 1 to march 1. winners will receive a $50 prize and publication. honorable mentions will also be published and receive a $10 prize. all decisions will be announced in early april and made by our editing staff. to get a feel for what we publish, we’d encourage you to scroll through our archives.

do beware that our publishing software doesn’t handle formatting very well, so think twice before you submit a work heavily dependent on visual presentation. for an example of what the display would look like, we’d encourage you to look at the page of “ghost ship” by charlotte oliver. (thetiderises.org/read/ghost-ship)

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Artwork / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Non-fiction / Poetry / Pro

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Taking Submissions: Strange Horizons: Wuxia & Xianxia Special

Deadline: March 1st, 2023
Payment: Fiction: 10¢/word USD, Poetry: $50 per poem, Non-Fiction: $50 for a column, $40 for a reprinted essay, $150 for an original essay, $45 to an interviewer, and $45 to an interviewee, $20 to a roundtable moderator, and $20 to each other contributor
Theme: Stories that fit in wuxia and xianxia fiction

Imagine yourself as a sword fighter, a vigilante hero and upholder of justice. Imagine you are a xia in the world of jianghu—whether a solitary traveller on a mission, an outlaw on the run, or a member of a powerful sect or dying clan. Or imagine you are a Daoist cultivator, soaring across the sky atop swords and clouds, with a story that stretches across realms and even lifetimes.

Welcome to the Wuxia & Xianxia Special, fellow walkers of the jianghu.

Many of us have become fans of wuxia and xianxia fiction ever since we first encountered eminent wuxia and xianxia authors like Jin Yong, Gu Long, and Huan Zhu Lou Zhu. Others among us fell in love with these genres through films from the Shaw Brothers Studio, Pili puppet shows, drama adaptations, RPGs, manhua, and other kinds of popular media.

Over the past decade, there has also been a new and revived interest in the xianxia genre with the rise of web novels, and more recently, through the lens of danmei, as shown by the popularity of dramas like The Untamed.

For this special issue, we are interested in:

  • Traditional and new approaches to wuxia and xianxia fiction
  • Stories full of action, conflict, drama, and intrigue
  • Rich, diverse, colourful, and nuanced worldbuilding, whether featuring the jianghu, a xianxia world, the imperial court, or other kinds of setting
  • Unique approaches to classic wuxia themes like honour, free love, good versus evil, and individual choice versus fate
  • Re-imaginings of what these genres look like in the 21st century
  • Works that experiment with, subvert, and reinvent genre tropes, including in combination with other Sinophone literary traditions such as danmei, chuanyue (time travel), gong’an fiction (court case), and beyond

The editors for the Wuxia/Xianxia Special invite you to submit fiction, poetry, translations, and nonfiction.
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Events / Magazine / Poetry / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Eye to the Telescope #48

Deadline: March 15th, 2023
Payment: US 4¢/word rounded up to nearest dollar; minimum US $4, maximum $25
Theme: Poetry involving fungi! Details below

Eye to the Telescope 48, Fungi, will be edited by Avra Margariti.

FUNGI: Mushrooms, molds, and other fungi are organisms that live all around us, yet for the longest time they have eluded classification. They can offer sustenance and ensure survival, or cause a slow, poisoned death. Their mycelium and spores spread–subterranean, airborne–beyond our perception. Within forest ecosystems, fungi are decomposers: feeding on dead matter, returning the nutrients to the soil in a perpetual cycle of destruction and rebirth.

I am particularly interested in cli-fi, body horror, and fabulism from marginalized voices. Make me feel the sublime ache of metamorphosis, the transcendental comfort of belonging in a colony. Send me poems about prehistoric Prototaxites populating the earth; mycologists using parasitic cordyceps to reanimate the dead; Amanita princesses, priests, and witches; the Fungal Folk evolving to survive in space, a starship built out of their own filaments and tendrils.

Embrace the beauty in decay, and let your imagination mushroom like foxfire gleaming bioluminescent through the forest dark.

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Artwork / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Novella / Ongoing Submissions / Poetry

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Ongoing Submissions: Vast Chasm Magazine

Payment: $50
Theme: bold work that explores the expansive human experience

Vast strives to be an engaged literary press that explores the expansive human experience and celebrates complex, diverse voices.

Our mission is to publish bold work, champion distinct artists, and cultivate literary community.

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Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Online / Poetry / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: NonBinary Review #31

Deadline: February 1st, 2023
Payment: Fiction: 1 cent per word, Poetry: $10 per poem, Art: $25 flat fee, Cover art: $50
Theme: Food

NonBinary Review is open for submissions on the theme of “food.” Food touches every single person on the planet, and can be one of the most fraught relationships a person can have. We’re not looking for recipes, or stories in which food is incidental. We want to read about how food joins people, divides people, shapes those with too much and those with not enough. Who grows food? Who hauls it around? Who cooks it? How is working professionally with food different than cooking at home? There are so many aspects of this necessity of life, and we want to hear them – especially the unexpected, the complicated, the life-changing.

All submissions must have a clear relationship to our theme, and be double-spaced in 12pt Times New Roman or they will be rejected. NonBinary Review  pays 1¢ per word for prose with a limit of 3000 words.

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Artwork / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Non-fiction / Poetry / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Haven Speculative 2023 Limited Demographic Call #1

Submission Window: January 1st-31st, 2023
Payment: 1 cent per word for fiction, $5 for poetry, 1 cent per word for non-fiction, $35 for cover art
Theme: Speculative fiction
Note: Limited Demographic: Authors of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and other underrepresented groups.

Submission Windows

General submission window
  • February 01-28
  • April 01-30
  • June 01-30
  • August 01-31
  • October 01-31
  • December 01-31
Limited demographic window
  • January 01-31
  • March 01-31
  • May 01-31
  • July 01-31
  • September 01-30
  • November 01-30

It’s our goal to publish diverse voices from around the world, and to do that, we are actively seeking stories, poems, and non-fiction pieces by authors from backgrounds that have been historically underrepresented in the science fiction and fantasy canon. Our submission cycle is therefore split into two categories, where every other month is explicitly reserved for submissions by authors of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and other underrepresented groups. The interposing six months remain open to everyone.

Guidelines for Fiction

We are seeking stories in the English language up to 6,000 words by writers from around the world. We favor submisions that have not been published before (including on your own website), though we do accept a limited number of reprints not currently appearing anywhere online. For our two issues focused on the climate crisis, we’re particularly interested in publishing stories from people displaced by or threatened by the climate emergency (see our themes below). For our other four issues, we’re open to a wide variety of stories across the SFF and weird spectra.

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Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Ongoing Submissions / Poetry

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Ongoing Submissions: Menagerie

Payment: $50
Theme: the wild and weird and uncanny not told in a standard story format (read below!)

Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art.

RAINER MARIE RILKE, LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

Menagerie publishes fictions, essays, and poems. We believe in sentences so sharp they draw blood, the strange and inexplicable, the wild and weird and uncanny, words in thickets, clusters, and flocks, pieces that move us beyond caring what others think about said pieces.

Things we like: fictions ala Borges, Link, Calvino, & Sparks; weird lyric essay; engagements with the environment and natural world; poems that explode form; bricolage, masala, & sagul sagul; forays into the omnipresent information-saturated online architecture we live in.

Things we don’t: lukewarm prose, sentences bereft of emotion, formulaic attempts at being on trend, conformity, pat endings, sentiment-drenched rhyming poems, neat and orderly stories.

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